Legitimacy in an Era of Fragmentation: The Case of Global Climate Governance

Sylvia I. Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and Jeffrey McGee
Additional contact information
Sylvia I. Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen: Sylvia I. Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen is assistant professor with the Public Administration and Policy Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and academy fellow at Turku University, Finland.
Jeffrey McGee: Jeffrey McGee is senior lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Global Environmental Politics, 2013, vol. 13, issue 3, 56-78

Abstract: Studies grounded in regime theory have examined the effectiveness of “minilateral” climate change forums that have emerged outside of the UN climate process. However, there are no detailed studies of the legitimacy of these forums or of the impacts of their legitimacy on effectiveness and governance potential. Adopting the lens of legitimacy, we analyze the reasons for the formation of minilateral climate change forums and their recent role in global climate governance. We use Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and Vihma's analytical framework for international institutions to examine three minilateral climate forums: the Asia-Pacific Partnership, the Major Economies Meetings, and the G8 climate process. These forums have significant deficits in their source-based, process-based, and outcome-based legitimacy, particularly when compared to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. If assessed purely on grounds of effectiveness, the minilateral forums might be easily dismissed as peripheral to the UN climate process. However, they play important roles by providing sites for powerful countries to shape the assumptions and expectations of global climate governance. Thus, the observed institutional fragmentation allows key states to use minilateral forums to shape the architecture of global climate governance. © 2013 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: global climate governance; climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00183 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:13:y:2013:i:3:p:56-78

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().